How Brazil Hopes to Make Amazon a Model for a Green Economy

In its name, pharmaceutical companies already plunder tropical forests for genes to make new drugs, power producers switch from burning coal to harvesting trees for “biomass,” and foresters replace natural biodiverse forests with plantations of single species of trees.

Many countries — from the United States to Malaysia and Brazil to the nations of the European Union — have adopted strategies for developing their bioeconomies as a means of boosting economic growth, while reducing their dependence on fossil fuels. But until now there has been no agreed definition of what a bioeconomy might be. “The prefix ‘bio’ carries a lot of ambiguity,” says Francisco de Assis Costa of the Center for Amazonian Studies in the Federal University of Pará.

Lula says he wants to change all that by creating a greener, less extractive, and more socially responsible version of bioeconomics for the Amazon and the world. At the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro this month, he hopes to get commitments to the first-ever internationally agreed definition of the term, which member nations and international institutions would adopt in their bioeconomic strategies.

The G20 agreement, though not binding on its signatories, aims to require that ecological resources are exploited sustainably — to protect nature rather than plundering it and to support nature’s traditional stewards rather than sidelining them.

Lula wants to make his country’s Amazon rainforest ecosystems and communities a model for the world, and to make that model central to his climate ambitions for Brazil. Next year, he will also host a U.N. climate conference (COP30) in Belem, the capital of the Amazon state of Pará, which has set its own targets for using bioeconomics to deliver carbon neutrality.

But can Lula and other G20 leaders deliver on the promises they make in Rio? Or, as investors push greenbacks into the rainforests, is it an illusion to imagine that we can harness nature for its own benefit as well as our own?

Ever since the word was first coined in the 1970s by Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, bioeconomics has meant different things to different people. Academics have identified four distinct — and often contradictory — meanings.

Two of the definitions are largely extractive. They target either biotechnology, using genes culled from nature to synthesize new products, or seek profits from harvesting large volumes of wood and other forest products to replace everything from steel in construction and plastics in packaging to fuel in power plants — what is often called the “bioresources” approach.

The other two definitions are more ecologically and socially aware. “Bioecology” sees trading in the diverse products of ecosystems — fruits, nuts, medicinal plants, fish, plant oils, and more — as a means of giving value to preserving biodiversity; while a “biocultural” approach promotes traditional knowledge and cultural relationships with nature as the best route to both ecological protection and environmental justice for forest dwellers. Such disparate definitions for bioeconomics can lead to very different policy outcomes.

For a long time, the two extractive definitions have dominated policymaking. A review last year of 78 governmental bioeconomy policy documents from around the world found that almost all “prioritize economic growth.”

As Thomas Fatheuer, a social scientist at the Berlin-based Heinrich Boll Foundation, puts it, for most governments “bioeconomic discourse reduces the whole of nature — plants, animals and microorganisms — to a resource called ‘biomass’” and “conceives of nature in terms of natural capital.” Such an approach, he says, damages ecosystems and disregards the interests of their inhabitants and traditional custodians.

It need not be so. The term could become a route to reordering rather than retrenching economic priorities. Hannah Mowat, campaigns coordinator at Fern, a Brussels-based advocate for forests and their inhabitants, says: “It could be something very good — promoting local production and increasing revenue stream for communities,” by helping them sell into international markets, for instance.

At the upcoming summit on November 18-19, Lula will, as the current G20 chair, ask his fellow leaders to endorse 10 “high-level principles in bioeconomy” drawn up by a panel of international experts from G20 countries that he convened. Such an endorsement would, his government says, be “the first time that the bioeconomy has been the subject of a multilaterally agreed document devoted to this topic.” Though the principles are “nonbinding,” the Brazilian government says they “are expected to serve as a basis for future discussions on bioeconomy in the world,” with further debate at the next G20 meeting, in South Africa next year.

Besides promoting economic activity, the principles include ecological parameters such as the conservation of biodiversity, sustainable consumption, widespread reuse of biological resources, restoration of degraded ecosystems, and adaptation to climate change. The principles also include social parameters such as eradicating hunger, protecting Indigenous rights, and equitable sharing of the benefits of the use of genetic resources and traditional knowledge.

Whether G20 leaders take those principles seriously after they fly home may depend on whether Lula can show progress on delivering a green bioeconomy for the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest and one of the greatest stores of both biodiversity and terrestrial carbon, where some of the best protected areas are under Indigenous management.

His government does not lack ambition to do things differently. The country’s new National Bioeconomy Strategy is driven by “the need for an economy that uses our natural capital sustainably [to] preserve and replenish the Amazon,” says Carina Pimenta, secretary of bioeconomy at the country’s Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change. It aims to do that, she says, by putting “Indigenous and traditional peoples’ activities on the same level as the different economic sectors that have traditionally discussed this issue.”

Local administrations in the Amazon are taking up the call. Pará state, once the front line of deforestation, has drawn up its own bioeconomy strategy, PlanBio, which is now being used to crack down on deforestation by cattle ranchers and aims to make the state carbon neutral within 15 years.

The stakes are high, says Joana Chiavari, an environmental lawyer at the Climate Policy Initiative and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. “The Amazon has the greatest potential and the greatest risks associated [with] the promotion of bioeconomy.” But the seeds for a green bioeconomy are in place, with a handful of local sustainably sourced forest crops already for sale internationally.

An early pioneer was the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, created by government decree in 1990 and named after the assassinated rubber tapper and environmental activist. Its 2.3 million acres of forest in Acre state are set aside for harvesting wild rubber latex and Brazil nuts. The reserve suffers some deforestation, because cattle raising is more lucrative, but its forests remain largely intact. It has come a beacon for other forest-harvesting initiatives.

The most economically successful forest crop in the Amazon is the purple berry of a palm tree called açaí, found in swamps and cultivated on family plots, from Pará in the east to Acre in the west. Since the 1990s, the berry — along with açaí juice and other products — has garnered a billion-dollar international market as a health food. Such is the consumer enthusiasm that local cultural traditions associated with the berry have become tourist attractions. The annual AçaíFestival in the Acre town of Feijó draws more than 50,000 people.

Another Indigenous success story is the marketing of numerous species of pepper cultivated in the forest and processed by Baniwa women in the Alto Rio Negro Indigenous Territory. The peppers have long been central to the tribe’s spiritual traditions and coming-of-age ceremonies. Now the women sell their unique jiquitaia blend of 78 peppers to top restaurants and celebrity chefs across the country, as well as to speciality stores in the United States and elsewhere.

And it is not just Indigenous communities that are taking the lead. An estimated 400,000 women descendants of African slaves brought to Brazil from the 16^th to 19^th centuries and now living across the Amazon are harvesting and selling coconuts from the babaçu palm tree to make oil for soap, cosmetics, cooking oil and other products for sale across Brazil. To protect their resources, they often need to repulse cattle ranchers invading their forests.

The importance of such fruits of the forest for the Brazilian economy is often underappreciated. By one official measure, natural products from the Amazon make up less than 0.01 percent of the country’s economy. But Carlos Nobre of the National Institute for Amazonian Research, in a manifesto for a New Economy for the Brazilian Amazon published by the World Resources Institute last year, found that such data seriously underestimate its importance. The bioeconomy “is partially invisible in national accounts,” he said, because many local transactions take place outside the formal economy.

Nobre puts their economic contribution more than 10 times higher than previous estimates. He says that a fully developed Amazon bioeconomy based of fruits of the forest could reach $6.75 billion by 2050 and employ nearly a million people. But will it happen?

Nobre co-chairs the Science Panel for the Amazon, a grouping of 280 conservation-minded scientists which argues that a successful socio-bioeconomy for the region requires not just the promotion of a handful of charismatic forest crops, but more radical policy shifts. It requires stopping activities such as cattle ranching and mining that threaten Indigenous rights or damage their forests, and instead engaging with local producers to build the infrastructure they need to grow their businesses, such as electricity supplies for refrigerating and processing forest products, and reliable transportation to facilitate trade.

So far, investment in exploiting the biological riches of the Amazon has looked very different. According to an analysis published by Chiavari in September, three-quarters of Brazil’s supposedly bioeconomic investment to date has gone into plantation forests, providing pulp for paper and biomass for generating energy. Less than a quarter has gone into developing products from native forest species or sustaining small-scale family farming

Meanwhile, corporations and research institutes based in the developed world retain a stronghold over the Amazon’s genetic wealth. The Brazilian patent office found that of some 43,000 patents filed worldwide for innovation from Amazon biodiversity, just 5 percent are held in Brazil. The biggest holders included major international food brands Nestlé and Unilever, the Japan-based vegetable oil giant Fuji Oil, and German chemicals conglomerate BASF.

This top-down extraction of the resources of the Amazon is a long way from Lula’s vision of a bottom-up ecological and people-centred bioeconomy. Brazil’s bioeconomic chameleon has yet to turn green.

And what happens to the Brazilian Amazon matters globally — because of the importance of the Amazon itself as a carbon sink and biodiversity hotspot; because Brazil is the world’s tenth largest economy; and because Lula is widely seen as a rising leader of the Global South. His blueprint for a bioeconomy will likely be adopted by other nations. Much may hang on how it develops, and whether it succeeds.

Fred Pearce is a board member of Fern, whose campaigns coordinator is quoted in this article.